Why does LASD Lt. Eric Strong—now LA County Probation’s Chief of Safety & Security—appear to keep breaking the law?

When last year Los Angeles County Sheriff’s lieutenant Eric Strong was loaned to LA County Probation as their Chief Safety and Security Officer, not everyone was convinced it was a great idea to bring in an outsider.

Strong, as readers may remember, is one of the cluster of people who ran for sheriff against Alex Villanueva in 2022. He did not make it to the November runoff, but in the spring primary he came in a respectable third behind Villanueva and Robert Luna, who was to oust the unpopular sitting sheriff.

When Strong ran for sheriff, he came off as bright, personable, with a feeling for the needs of the county’s various communities, and driven by enough ambition that he was willing to run for public office.

This past week, however,  Cece Woods at the Current, published a story that suggests Strong’s present ambition may be focused on using his position at the nation’s largest county probation agency, as a catapult to a more prominent position in the LASD, where rising above the rank of lieutenant has long eluded him. 

To do so, Wood describes how that same ambition may have led to a pattern of violating the legal rights of department members and others investigated for one reason or another by Strong and those working under his direction. 

When WitnessLA began digging further into the matter, probation sources and others verified most of the incidents that Woods described, and more. 

Specifically, WLA’s informants provided a disturbing portrait of Strong and his second in command, Deputy Probation Officer II Mario Padilla, alarmingly cutting legal corners when engaging in searches, and similar actions.

At the same time, when it comes to the critical task of keeping drugs out of the county’s youth halls—a goal that should arguably rank at or near the top of Strong and company’s main responsibilities—the Chief Safety and Security Officer appears to be failing.

But first let’s look at an example of Strong & company’s alleged disregard for the law.

A supervisor is detained

On February 18, at around 2:45 p.m. Supervising Detention Services Officer Richard Ruiz arrived for his shift at Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall. After parking his car, he headed for the facility’s lobby where he underwent the security screening that has become routine for visitors and staff, due to the problem of contraband—including narcotics such as fentanyl—which continues to make its way into the Downey-located Los Padrinos (LP as it is known for short), and Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall, in Sylmar, with potentially deadly consequences.

At the time of the incident in question, SDSO Ruiz was reportedly feeling under the weather.  But not having enough staff on duty on any given day at the county’s youth lock-ups has become notoriously problematic. So Ruiz, reportedly figured he’d suck it up and go to work anyway, so as not to let his staff down.

As it turned out, Ruiz would not make it to work that day.  Instead, as he moved along in line, Deputy Probation Officer II Mario Padilla confronted Ruiz with a large plastic bag containing four pills: an over-the-counter cold medication, an over-the-counter pain killer, and some antibiotics.

Ruiz recognized the bag Padilla was thrusting his direction, as a transparent Ziploc sandwich bag he had evidently accidentally dropped as he moved toward the screening,

Ruiz explained to Padilla that the over-the-counter medications were to control his cold symptoms.  The antibiotic pill in the bag had been prescribed by his physician to help with his persistent cough. 

Nevertheless, Padilla, who Ruiz would eventually learn was Eric Strong’s second in command, asked Ruiz for his employee number.

It was a weird request, but Ruiz gave his employee number to Padilla.  Then, in the hope of heading off any further confrontations, when Padilla asked Ruiz to put the baggie of medications back in his personal vehicle which was parked in the parking lot nearby, he complied right away.  

After doing so, he reentered the facility and headed for LP’s visiting area, where kids were meeting family members and others.

About 30 minutes later, while the supervisor was still working in the visiting area, he was approached by Padilla again, who told Ruiz he was conducting “an internal investigation,” and then forcibly herded the man whose rank was superior to his into an empty office.

According to our sources, things went quickly downhill from there.

First, Padilla (along with some additional probation staff members who by then had materialized), refused to allow SDSO Ruiz to leave the random office where they’d taken him. 

Padilla finally informed Ruiz that Padilla’s boss, Eric Strong, had instructed that Ruiz was to be detained “pending” the aforementioned “internal investigation.”  What kind of investigation was unclear.

As Ruiz would learn later, it was at that point that that Padilla began making a surreptitious audio recording, which is illegal in the state of California for civilians, but not for law enforcement.*

During the confinement in the room, Padilla told Ruiz that a K-9 dog employed by a civilian security company had alerted to narcotics on SDSO Ruiz’s person.  As a consequence, Padilla wanted to search Ruiz’s vehicle.

Reportedly knowing he had no contraband narcotics, or anything else of that nature, on his person or in his car, Ruiz questioned Padilla’s representation of the dog’s reaction, figuring Police K-9 scent-trained dogs would be unlikely to alert on his cold medication.

Ruiz would later learn that the civilian security company’s dogs were not certified by the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, which meant that any such alert by the dogs, could be used as the basis of probable cause.

It was at this point that Ruiz asked to call his lawyer. 

Padilla permitted the call but gave Ruiz no privacy. Instead he reportedly hovered around the supervisor during the call, in a manner that Ruiz felt was meant to intimidate.

After talking to his attorney, Ruiz told Padilla that he did not give consent to the search of his vehicle. 

At or about 5 p.m., following his refusal to allow the search of his car, Ruiz began to feel that the investigation, which had by then lasted more than two hours, was about to get worse. Matters weren’t help by the fact that Ruiz was now feeling truly unwell.

Ruiz pulled out his cell phone and called the Downey Police Department to report the fact that he was a probation supervisor and he was being held against his will.

A little under an hour later still,  Officers Hernandez and Gomez from Downey PD arrived and began to escort Ruiz out of the empty office where he was still being detained.

Padilla intervened and told the Downey officers that Ruiz was being held pending an internal investigation and was not free to leave. 

Perhaps hoping to further make his point with the Downey cops, Padilla then handcuffed Ruiz, reportedly closing the handcuffs so tightly around the supervisor’s wrists that they were painful and would later leave marks.  Ruiz asked Padilla to loosen the cuffs.  Padilla did not do so.

(According to a subsequent report by Ruiz’s attorney, Tom Yu, who was a police officer before pursuing his career in the law, the handcuffing interaction was captured on one of the Downey cops’ body-worn cameras, which Ruiz and his lawyer would later obtain.)

Eventually the Downey cops left, and Padilla reportedly told Ruiz that he was following orders from his boss, Eric Strong.  Then, according to Yu, Padilla “illegally searched SDSO Ruiz’s person and read him his Miranda rights.”

After that, Padilla reportedly “used physical force” to move the now tightly-handcuffed Ruiz back to the empty office located inside LP, where the supervisor was allegedly imprisoned from approximately 6 p.m. to nearly 7:30 p.m.

During that approximately 90 minutes, Ruiz asked to make another phone call and was told he could not do so. He was also allegedly denied the use of his medications, and drinking water, despite the fact that Ruiz was struggling with a bad cough that continued to worsen.

At or about 7:30 p.m., Strong arrived at LP and took over. 

First Strong reportedly asked Ruiz where his car keys were located, then forcibly took the keys, and ordered his staff members to search Ruiz’s vehicle. The subsequent search was accomplished without the supervisor’s consent, without a warrant and, it appears, without any discernible probable cause.

As a result of the search, Strong and company found and took (without consent) the completely legal baggie of medications that had originally triggered the series of events.

Finally, at or about 8:15 p.m., Supervisor Ruiz was released from custody. 

Instead of going home, Ruiz allowed his sister, who also works for the department, to drive him to a local hospital. There the exhausted and still coughing supervisor was treated for various minor injuries and emerging symptoms—including heart palpitations—until 5 a.m., at which time he was finally released to his sister who drove him home.

On February 21, 2024, Ruiz’s attorney emailed a notice to Probation Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa, and other department higher-ups including Strong, telling LA County Probation to “preserve evidence due to impending litigation.” 

The notice also requested that probation should “immediately conduct a thorough criminal investigation” of the actions of “Mr. Eric Strong and Mr. Mario Padilla, Jr. for committing false imprisonment, kidnapping, excessive force under the color of authority, and vehicular burglary.”

The “vehicular burglary” allegation was based on the fact that after Strong released Ruiz, Padilla reportedly blocked the supervisor’s personal car in the LP parking lot with his own county issued car.

Bad patterns 

It is our understanding that the reported experience of Supervisor Ruiz with Strong and Padilla, is not a one-off.

WLA’s sources, and those of the Current, describe multiple episodes of searching the phones and/or cars of probation employees and others without the needed probable cause and/or a warrant.  Thus far, these alleged rights-violating instances appear to have led to exactly zero charges by the DA’s office, reportedly because the evidence isn’t there, or it was acquired illegally.

There was reportedly one case where Eric Strong took the suspect’s phone to his own home, thus destroying the chain of custody.

Meanwhile drugs are reportedly still pouring into Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall which, as of last week, contains approximately 285 youth, including seven 13-year-olds and a dozen 12-year-olds.

On Thursday, March 21, LP staff were able to intercept ten drug-filled vape pens, while Strong and company were reportedly otherwise engaged.

And in other news….the group of supervisors who had the most success in getting drugs out of the two main youth halls are still on home confinement. They are also represented by civil rights attorney Tom Yu, in a whistleblowers’ lawsuit.

Added to that…. the deadline for the shut down of Los Padrinos and Barry J Nidorf Juvenile Halls by the Board of State and Community Corrections (BSCC) is approaching, with inexplicably little progress being made to prevent the shut down.

More on this last issue in an upcoming story.  So…stay tuned

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*Correction, March 26, 5:45 p.m.: We originally thought that Padilla’s secret recording of his interaction with Ruiz was against the law, but we’ve since learned that it was likely legal because Padilla’s actions, in general, were at the direction of Eric Strong who is a law enforcement officer. Here’s the relevant section in the CA penal code.